i know you said "other than where i live" but seriously, they should bring it to rural vermont, where i live. it certainly wouldnt be the most profitable when it comes to subscribers/resources invested ratio but the places where those ratios are good already have fast internet. i have the fastest connection available at my house and it's DSL max D/L speeds around 350 kbps. give some love to those of us who not only enjoy the internet, but enjoy being surrounded by trees and wild animals instead of concrete and steel

The thing is that rural doesn't have enough people to sustain digging up roads and laying down fiber, while having a cheap monthly price. But while Google may currently be testing deploying fiber in a suburban area; they could try to expand to an urban area, where presumably they'd see just how difficult/easy it would be to deploy fiber in those cities. Probably not as easy as people think, because permits would be an issue.

I can see here on long island and NYC being the next spot. We have the density required and google has that huge office in NYC. Plus access to 2 National Labs and a whole bunch of cross atlantic cables to Europe.

Now we do have cablevision and Verizon fios here so they might think we have good enough service for them Not to do it .

i know you said "other than where i live" but seriously, they should bring it to rural vermont, where i live. it certainly wouldnt be the most profitable when it comes to subscribers/resources invested ratio but the places where those ratios are good already have fast internet. i have the fastest connection available at my house and it's DSL max D/L speeds around 350 kbps. give some love to those of us who not only enjoy the internet, but enjoy being surrounded by trees and wild animals instead of concrete and steel

upstate NY is mostly the same - I live near a city with 2 large universities and a lot of local tech companies, but if you move 5 miles out where the rent is cheaper, you're stuck with $70/month 2mbit rural DSL from Frontier (the worst ISP ever). I used to live with a coworker in the boonies and we quickly learned that 2mbit DSL just isn't enough for two snowed-in helpdesk workers who spend all day remoting into customer servers.

I have another coworker who lives just outside the city limits and is stuck with 56k dialup because he's in the half-mile area that doesn't get service from either the cable company or the shitty DSL unless he pays like $10k to have them run a line.

Google should find the most evil city and state government in the US and bring fiber there. Seriously. Kansas City bent over backwards to subsidize Google Fiber, but it's going to be much harder in places like South Carolina. If Google's lobbyists can defeat big telco's lobbyists for $70/month, then I'll be impressed.

Well, Glad to hear it's not a hobby, but I mean how sustainable is cable based anything, when used in SUCH a large deployment? We need a newer medium, preferably that has ridiculous amounts of bandwidth, and can use some form of optical stream, but how?

OK, that's an impossible question! Everyone has rationales for why where they live would be the best next place for Google Fiber...

I think the Boston area would be perfect. Boston isn't really that big, and the Rt. 128 corridor is the Silicon Valley of the East along w/ having tons of Universities, so Google fiber here would have an outsized impact on new Internet innovation.

I think that Google was wise to start at the metropolitan area closest to the geographical center of the US. If they are as ambitious as I think they are: The "web" of fiber starts from there. I think that Omaha would be a good next step. Unless, of course, they want two more hubs. Then NY would be a good next step, since they already have an obvious starting point in CA.

Google will abandon fiber, just like Verizon did. It costs too much and takes too long.

I don't think Google really cares how much money it costs. Keep in mind that the only division that makes any serious money is its advertising business at 97% of their profits last time I checked. Android, self-driving cars, and most of Google's other web properties are really only a crude means to the end of serving more ads.

If anything, you can consider Google Fiber to be one of the best PR money ever spent as cities were willing to bend over backwards to get them to come to their area. Where else can you get such good PR on the cheap?

i know you said "other than where i live" but seriously, they should bring it to rural vermont, where i live. it certainly wouldnt be the most profitable when it comes to subscribers/resources invested ratio but the places where those ratios are good already have fast internet.

Vermont would be an interesting experiment in what can happen if you wire up a whole state with ultra high speed Internet. It's small enough both geographically and population wise that it would cost a lot less than if you tried that in most other states.

Google has already shown that its fiber service works in a market like KC. I would venture a guess at a city distinct from KC in some manner, but with a cooperative local government. Two possibilities:

1. Small to medium sized east coast city (geographically distinct). Somewhere in Florida? 2. A city larger and denser than KC, but not mega huge like Manhattan. Dallas, Texas?

I live in Chicago, so no self-interest here. It seems to me they should keep hitting 2nd and 3rd tier cities where cost of living is lower. The cost of labor to install is probably lower. A lower cost of living and more amenable municipalities seem like nice quick one-two punches for getting the ramped up quickly. I might be naive in thinking this is the case though.

The best ROI would be seen from places with rich "tech-savvy" people. Therefore, Norcal and NY. After all, I'm sure the irony of googlers not being able to use google fiber isn't lost on Google corporate!

Google shouldn't build anywhere else. At least not like the KC they've done.

Instead, they should offer to cities their expertise to build it, and open it up to other companies. Deliver 1Gbit/s to each house, and then allow various companies (cable, teleco, wireless, etc.) to offer services on top of that connection (tv, phone, internet, security systems, whatever else they want to get into) would bring about a new level of competition not seen ever. Municipalities would receive revenue, and use it to pay off the bonds they took out to pay Google to install it.

I live in middle TN, east of Nashville in a little hamlet called Cookeville. Our max speeds are 30 gbps charter, cable, or 24 gbps Frontier DSL. Neither are terrible, but Google could come in and change everything. The only reason I have these options is because I live in a University town. All of the south and especially the rural south is lacking in options and speed. Go for the places where high speed is most needed and you'll gain the most customers.

No brainier - inner cities. Hook up dilapidated urban schools at highly subsidized cost and turn them into places kids want to spend time in. Yeah they'll Facebook and whatnot, but it will be a huge attraction for smart and innovative educators and just the right step to get these schools up to code.

I live in middle TN, east of Nashville in a little hamlet called Cookeville. Our max speeds are 30 gbps charter, cable, or 24 gbps Frontier DSL. Neither are terrible, but Google could come in and change everything. The only reason I have these options is because I live in a University town. All of the south and especially the rural south is lacking in options and speed. Go for the places where high speed is most needed and you'll gain the most customers.

Extremely certain that you have neither 30gbps nor 24gbps. Otherwise, this story would be about your house, and not Google fiber. ;-)

No brainier - inner cities. Hook up dilapidated urban schools at highly subsidized cost and turn them into places kids want to spend time in. Yeah they'll Facebook and whatnot, but it will be a huge attraction for smart and innovative educators and just the right step to get these schools up to code.

providing fast internet to horribly impoverished inner-city schools isn't going to magically turn them into engineer factories. most of the students in those schools are so poor that the free/reduced school lunch is their only reliable source of nutrition, they don't have computers at home, and only the "richer" families have access to the gadgetry that the typical Ars reader takes for granted, like smartphones.

Google has a tremendous amount of money, but even they won't be able to singlehandedly fix all the problems faced by the poor urban population.

No brainier - inner cities. Hook up dilapidated urban schools at highly subsidized cost and turn them into places kids want to spend time in. Yeah they'll Facebook and whatnot, but it will be a huge attraction for smart and innovative educators and just the right step to get these schools up to code.

providing fast internet to horribly impoverished inner-city schools isn't going to magically turn them into engineer factories. most of the students in those schools are so poor that the free/reduced school lunch is their only reliable source of nutrition, they don't have computers at home, and only the "richer" families have access to the gadgetry that the typical Ars reader takes for granted, like smartphones.

Google has a tremendous amount of money, but even they won't be able to singlehandedly fix all the problems faced by the poor urban population.

i didn't say it would magically turn them into MIT, but just giving up and not trying to make any progress is BS. provide the school with that kind of access and kids will be more inclined to use it before, during and after school. educators will be invigorated to try new ways to reach out to students with proper tools. and of course they don't have smart phones or access at home, what a ridiculous thing to say, that is precisely why giving that access to schools is a positive for the community.

San Diego CA, the market here is a craptastic, you have ATT, Cox, and TW - none of which are budging on pricing nor even adding extra speed tiers. If they are concerned about customer base there are tons of businesses, schools, and regular users that really want faster internet.

1. Small to medium sized east coast city (geographically distinct). Somewhere in Florida? 2. A city larger and denser than KC, but not mega huge like Manhattan. Dallas, Texas?

Close - San Antonio - or even Austin - would be a better choice. San Antonio would be easier in terms of geography, and it's the home of 4 military bases, two gov't research facilities, 9 four-year/graduate level universities, a huge bio-medical and bio-tech center, and the nat'l HQ for Rackspace, Clear Channel, MedTronic, (formerly) AT&T, and way too many others to mention. Austin is surrounded by the likes of Dell, AMD and IBM, but none of them are close enough to actually be in Austin.

Omaha does make some sense. Google just built a huge datacenter next to Omaha, that is rumored to house Google Drive storage. Part of the Google Fiber service is Google Drive storage. Tying more fiber into the area is a good thing, and Omaha houses a big part of the telecom backbone of the country. That's why most of the big call-centers/telemarketing companies are here.

I think this is an obvious one. Saint Louis would provide a nearby build-out that is only incrementally larger. The cost of living isn't outrageous and it has a wide range of economic regions that are fairly densely clustered. I recently wrote up a post on bringing Google Fiber to Saint Louis and will continue lobbying until they choose us!